San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan said Monday that homelessness in San Jose has become a crisis and he issued an ordinance pledging to build safe, decent housing for people experiencing homelessness.
"Homelessness is an emergency and it's time we treat it as such. We're here today to introduce a new ordinance that will commit San Jose to building safe and decent housing for everyone, and reduce the barriers in the way, helping to end our era of encampments for the good of the entire city," Mahan said in Spanish during her meeting with reporters.
Joined by Deputy Mayor Rosemary Kamei, Council Members David Cohen and Omar Torres, and the Founder and Executive Director of Dignity Moves, Elizabeth Funk, he said that these actions will ensure that people have safe and dignified shelter and are on the path to a more permanent solution.
"The important thing here is that we call homelessness a crisis and an emergency. Our actions have been doing that for many years, but our actions have to match those words. We have to treat homelessness as a crisis, as an emergency, and that's what this statement does," Mahan said.
The official said that the declaration commits the city to accelerate actions through all possible levers, to build decent and safe housing, and to relocate people living in camps to them.
I remember that when the 1906 San Francisco earthquake occurred, leaving more than 5,060 people homeless, the government quickly built very basic earthquake-proof houses so that people would have a decent place to live and their own. "They took action because it was a real emergency."
"Homelessness on our streets is an emergency," Mahan said, calling for rhetoric to match action.
"We need to move quickly to build safe and dignified alternatives to the camps. We can end homelessness in a year," he said.
"If there was an earthquake that put 4,000 of our San Jose neighbors out on the streets within 72 hours, we'd have FEMA trailers at the county fairgrounds. So we have to act like it. It's time for the blame game to end," he said.
In this regard, he called for finding ways to speed up the process for the creation of these homes, such as modifying the terms of land use and zoning requirements, so that there are no obstacles to these sites existing and the decision-making process can be streamlined.